From the Murphysboro American:
Down a gravel road that cuts through steep wooded river bluffs along the Spoon River is a passive solar home with international provenance.
The home was conceived in the mind of Noel Lane while he was in Vietnam during the war.
It’s the only house along a three-mile stretch of road in a setting so peaceful that bald eagles and coyotes are more likely to visit than neighbors. In winter, Lane’s wife, Jamie, used to return home from third shift at the hospital where she worked, park on the main road and cross country ski in moonlight the rest of the way home…..
He said key elements that make passive solar effective are orientation, window placement, open floor plan and thermal mass. His utility bill in winter totals less than $85 a month for about 2,000 square feet of living space, as well as powering two deep freezers and a 15-year-old refrigerator.
Noel and Jamie Lane home schooled their sons but bought a house in Macomb so their youngest son could finish high school there. He and his mother live in town during the week.
From the Bangalore Mirror:
Vir Das has been funny since he was 21. After four years of serious acting at schools in the US, he concluded comedy was more fun. “It was more a rebellion than a shift. I needed an art form that was more personal and fluid,” he offers. Today, a stand-up comedian at 30, he gets all the laughs.
“I have the best job in the world,” he grins. In the city for his production house Weirdass Productions’ Ham-ateur Nights performances, Das has brought together young comedians who want to be funny, on “our owna terms” in every different mass medium. “And we also drink a lot of chai,” he admits…..
As a young acting student at Knox College, Illinois, Chicago, Das couldn’t sleep for weeks before his debut performance for an audience of 700. “After I got the first laugh and my first standing ovation, I couldn’t sleep for another couple of weeks, out of the excitement,” he remembers. But close to a decade in the business, his nightmares remain about not being able to see ghosts. “Being a comic is like being the only one in the room who saw the ghost. So I need to see ghosts around me everyday,” he exclaims.
From the Monmouth Review Atlas:
To understand the history of the Underground Railroad in Monmouth and Galesburg, it necessary to first understand about slavery, said Owen Muelder, director of the Galesburg Colony Underground Railroad Freedom Center at Knox College, who spoke at the Warren County Library Thursday.
While slavery has been in existence for 6,800 years and started out as the profits from war, modern slavery had its roots in Portugal when Prince Henry the Navigator opened his school of navigation. It was then that Europeans began bringing back slaves from their travels. Unlike in the Americas, slavery did not become central to the already-saturated European labor market….
For the most part, abolitionists came out of churches (primarily the Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians and to some extent the Methodists and Baptists) and the Enlightenment movement.
George Washington Gale, the founder of both Galesburg and Knox College, was instrumental in the Second Great Awakening, an evangelical movement of the time, which helped to lay the groundwork for the idea of the Underground Railroad.
Muelder emphasized that those on the Underground Railroad not only believed that slavery was wrong but were willing to put themselves on the line by breaking the law.
